dam we have built in karosses (skin cloaks), tortoise-shells, or wooden bowls.  We intended nothing of the ornamental in it, but when we came to a huge stone, we were forced to search for a way round it.  The consequence is, it has assumed a beautifully serpentine appearance.  This is, I believe, the first instance in which Bechuanas have been got to work without wages.  It was with the utmost difficulty the earlier missionaries got them to do anything.  The missionaries solicited their permission to do what they did, and this was the very way to make them show off their airs, for they are so disobliging; if they perceive any one in the least dependent upon them, they immediately begin to tyrannize.  A more mean and selfish vice certainly does not exist in the world.  I am trying a different plan with them.  I make my presence with any of them a favor, and when they show any impudence, I threaten to leave them, and if they don’t amend, I put my threat into execution.  By a bold, free course among them I have had not the least difficulty in managing the most fierce.  They are in one sense fierce, and in another the greatest cowards in the world.  A kick would, I am persuaded, quell the courage of the bravest of them.  Add to this the report which many of them verily believe, that I am a great wizard, and you will understand how I can with ease visit any of them.  Those who do not love, fear me, and so truly in their eyes am I possessed of supernatural power, some have not hesitated to affirm I am capable of even raising the dead!  The people of a village visited by a French brother actually believed it.  Their belief of my powers, I suppose, accounts, too, for the fact that I have not missed a single article either from the house or wagon since I came among them, and this, although all my things lay scattered about the room, while crammed with patients.”

It was unfortunate that the teacher whom Livingstone stationed with Bubi’s people was seized with a violent fever, so that he was obliged to bring him away.  As for Bubi himself, he was afterward burned to death by an explosion of gunpowder, which one of his sorcerers was trying, by means of burnt roots, to un-bewitch.

In advancing, Livingstone had occasion to pass through a part of the great Kalahari desert, and here he met with Sekomi, a chief of the Bamangwato, from whom also he received a most friendly reception.  The ignorance of this tribe he found to be exceedingly great: 

“Their conceptions of the Deity are of the most vague and contradictory nature, and the name of God conveys no more to their understanding than the idea of superiority.  Hence they do not hesitate to apply the name to their chiefs.  I was every day shocked by being addressed by that title, and though it as often furnished me with a text from which to tell them of the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom he has sent, yet it deeply pained me, and I never felt so fully convinced of the lamentable detoriation of our species.  It is indeed a mournful truth that man has become like the beasts that perish.”

The place was greatly infested by lions, and during Livingstone’s visit an awful occurrence took place that made a great impression on him: